Chapter Text
“Tell me if it hurts too much, alright?”
Jasmine nods, but her gaze is far away, and she doesn’t flinch as Lancer bandages her fingers. All he has to go on are two and a half YouTube videos and the instructions on the back of the Ace bandaging; as he works, he prays that he’s not fucking Jasmine’s hands up too badly. Danny is sitting across from them at the table, head pillowed on his arms and half asleep, a halo of band aid wrappers laid around him. His fingers twitch, as if sensing Jasmine’s ignorance to her own pain. Lancer glances up at her nervously. She’s staring at the wall. He clears his throat, and her eyes shift to meet his. In the sterile light of his kitchen, they are startlingly green, almost violently so. He’s reminded of his neighbor’s lawn, the one so bright he was convinced the grass was fake for three solid months.
“Do you feel okay?”
Jasmine withdraws her now fully bandaged hands. “Yes. Thank you,” she murmurs.
Lancer raises his eyebrows. He’s not sure he could boast the same composure if their positions were switched. She underwent this entire procedure on nothing but four Advil, and yet her eyes remain dry and her hands steady. She rests them in her lap awkwardly, palms up and fingers stiff with splints.
“I did the best I could, but I really think you should see a doctor. I think it’s easy for fingers to heal wrong, and it could affect you for the rest of your life,” Lancer presses.
Jasmine shrugs a shoulder. “It’s fine. It doesn’t hurt.”
“It’s supposed to hurt, Jasmine. That’s not a good sign.”
Jasmine shrugs again and goes back to staring at the wall. Worry curls in Lancer’s chest, pressing into his lungs and quickening his breath.
“Jasmine, please. I’m worried about you. Danny is worried. Do you have a plan? I’m willing to let you two stay here, but I doubt your parents aren’t going to come looking for you.”
They’ve only been with him a night, but he’s surprised he hasn’t received any panicked calls from the Fentons in search of their children. Then again, maybe they just don’t consider him close enough to the family to take part in the search.
Between the gap in the curtains, sunlight is beginning to tinge the sky pink. Lancer suddenly feels exhausted.
“Get some rest. We can figure this out in a few hours,” he says.
Jasmine nods and moves to wake Danny. He follows her half asleep down the hall and into the guest bedroom, and Lancer listens as the door shuts and the light switch flicks off. He leans back in his chair and runs his hands down his face with a sigh. He allows himself an indulgent moment of panic, to let his breaths come shallow as he considers all the danger these children are in, all of the lines they’ve stepped over together in the past few hours.
He grits his teeth and stands up to clean the mess of splints and bandage wrappers off the table. All the while, the sun moves further into the room. Normally Lancer would find the golden light comforting, but now it feels like the morning before an execution, a pull back into reality. He can’t hide them forever. Even if he could, is it right? What makes him think he can do anything to keep them safe? What makes him think he could ever hope to understand even a fraction of what they’re going through? The bandaging crinkles in his palm as he throws the wrappers away. He tries to take deep breaths as he pushes boxes of antiseptic and pain medication into his medicine cabinet.
It doesn’t matter whether he can do this or not, or even if it’s right. This is happening. These kids are hurting, and right now he might be the only person they’ve got. The only adult, anyways. Lancer looks back to his guest bedroom. The space under the door is dark.
Maybe he can’t hope to understand, but he doesn’t think he needs to understand to try and keep them safe.
Danny opens his eyes to a black, starless sky. There is dirt and blood in his mouth, but instinctively, he knows the blood is not his.
She isn’t breathing. He’s pressing down on her chest. Her ribs are snapping beneath his palms. He waits, wishing he could carve his own heart out to give to her, wishing he didn’t have to rely on hope and his own shaking hands for this. Here, though, beneath this empty sky, he thinks that is all he will be given.
She is dead. This is his fault. He knows this just like he knows he will never truly be able to join her.
Danny jolts awake, struggling to bring air into his lungs. His heart is pounding fiercely in his ears, and panic clenches his chest like a vice. On the other side of the bed, Jazz is still sleeping. Danny lies back down and tries to take deep breaths. He closes his eyes and listens to the house.
The air conditioning is humming quietly, and he can hear Lancer’s dishwasher going. Outside, birds are singing to each other. Inside, Lancer is pacing in his living room. Danny winces. He feels bad for all the trouble they’ve caused him, and the more trouble that they’ll inevitably cause him now that they’re hiding out here like fugitives. Danny’s heart rate kicks up again, and he returns his attention to cataloging the sounds around him. Crickets outside the window. The furnace down the hall shuddering to life. Blankets rustling beneath his hands. Jazz’s own even, deep breaths.
Danny’s eyes flick open and he sits up. Hesitantly, he reaches for Jazz’s wrist and presses his fingers beneath her palm. For a second the taste of rainwater and ozone is overwhelming.
She doesn’t have a pulse. That can’t be right; she’s definitely breathing. Dread washes over Danny, cool and slow. He holds his breath and presses slightly harder, waiting for a thud. Impossibly, it doesn’t come. He moves his fingers up to her neck. Nothing.
“Shit,” he whispers.
Jazz curls away from his cold hand and rubs at her eyes.
“Danny? What’re you doing?” she says.
She sits up in the bed and pushes her hair out of her face, pausing when she catches his expression.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” she says.
“Uh…I-I don’t know,” he admits.
Jazz reaches up to pass her hand over her neck where Danny’s was.
“Were you checking my pulse? I told you, I’m okay.”
“Can you check it?” Danny asks.
Jazz gives him a funny look. Danny presses his mouth into a hard line. She raises her hand and presses it beneath her jaw line. Her eyes dart to the side after a moment, brows furrowing as she presses her fingers harder.
“Huh,” she says.
“‘Huh’? That’s all you have to say?” Danny says.
“What do you want me to say?” Jazz says.
Danny throws his arms out. “Um, I don’t know. Maybe ‘this is really fucking weird?’”
“I figured that was a given,” Jazz says.
“Oh, my god. I killed you. You’re dead. I’m talking to a ghost right now.”
Jazz has the audacity to laugh. “Danny, I’m not dead.”
She cuts herself off, face twisting into one of thought. “Or--hm. I mean, I’m not fully dead, at least. I’m…something.”
“Great! You’re something. That is so reassuring, Jazz, thank you.”
“No problem.”
Danny frowns at her. She stares back at him blankly.
“You’re freaking me out,” he says.
“Sorry?” she says.
They sit in silence for a moment. Danny draws his knees up to his chest.
“So…do we have a plan?” he whispers.
Jazz looks away. She’s pressed the fingers of her good hand to her opposite wrist, almost unconsciously.
“I don’t know, Danny. I mean, I don’t even know…” she trails off. “Danny, I might still-I might not be a hundred percent.”
“Yeah, I figured that was a given,” he says dryly.
She shakes her head. “No, that’s not…we don’t know how that gun worked. What exactly it does to people who are--were--alive. I’m just saying that I don’t know if I’ll make it through this.”
She speaks carefully, slowly. Danny stiffens, suddenly feeling very stupid.
“Oh,” he says.
“Yeah,” Jazz says, soft.
Danny grits his teeth. What little relief he’d managed to gather overnight is crushed out of his shoulders with one breath. He shakes his head.
“No. No way. If I could make it through the stupid portal, you can handle this. It’s in our blood, or something.”
Jazz looks up and gives him a half smile. “Or something.”
Danny’s chin trembles, and Jazz’s eyes are damp. “Promise me you won’t give up. That we’ll try to figure this out.”
Jazz reaches out to take his hand and nods. “I promise. Even though I’d totally make a better ghost than you.”
Danny laughs and swipes at his eyes. “Not funny, Jazz.”
“Too soon?”
Danny shoves her shoulder and she grins, hooking her arm around his neck to ruffle his hair. Tears smart at Danny’s eyes, but he feels lighter than he has in weeks.
“You’re the worst,” he says.
She tucks him close to press a quick kiss to his head before letting him go.
“Yeah, I know,” she says.
Danny takes a deep breath and Jazz tucks her hair behind her ears.
“Do you feel any different?” he says.
Jazz is quiet for a moment. She takes a deep breath in, stretches her legs out in front of her.
“Yes. But I’m not sure why, or how, exactly. But I feel different.”
Danny chews on the inside of his cheek. “Okay. We should go talk to Lancer before he paces through his carpet.”
“Good call,” Jazz says.
Lancer pauses his trampling of his carpet when Danny steps into the living room, Jazz following behind him. She’s walking slow and leaning on the wall enough to make Danny’s chest tight, but her expression isn’t one of pain.
“Did you get some sleep?” Lancer says.
“Did you?” Danny says, glancing skeptically to the dark circles beneath Lancer’s eyes and his haphazard hair.
“What time is it?” Jazz says.
Lancer twists his wrist around to look at his watch. “1:49.”
They all stand quietly for a moment. Danny can feel Lancer’s anxiety hardening the air, making it brittle and sharp.
“We need to figure this out,” Lancer finally says.
“Yeah,” Danny agrees.
“Alright. Sit down. Let me get you some lunch.”
Jazz and Danny both sit on his couch, the same one Danny fell asleep on what feels like a million years ago. He isn’t reminiscing for that time, exactly, but it’s easy to miss the bad when you’ve been subjected to the worse. He absentmindedly runs his hands over the cushioning as Lancer returns with sandwiches and water. Lancer waits until they’ve started eating to speak.
“Do you think your parents will report you both missing?”
“No,” Jazz says.
Danny swallows and looks up at her. “Wait, why not?”
“For one thing, Maddie’s ego just wouldn’t allow it. For another, as far as they know, I’m allied with the enemy and you just ran away.”
Danny hums in thought. “Oh, yeah. I guess in their eyes I just disappeared when you did.”
Jazz nods. Lancer leans forward and laces his fingers together. “So--they’ll search for you themselves? Privately?”
“That would be my best guess. I bet they’ll call into school and tell them that we’re sick or something to buy themselves some time.”
“That’ll only last a couple weeks before the school starts getting suspicious,” Lancer says.
“Yeah. Their reputation is on the line right now. One of their kids is a traitor, and the other was able to vanish right beneath their noses because they were too busy fighting ghosts to pay attention. I doubt child services would take that very well.”
“That works for us, then, if nobody but Maddie and Dad are looking,” Danny murmurs.
He wishes he could feel relief at the small reprieve they’ve been given, but mostly he feels a dull sadness. There’s always the chance that Jazz is wrong; that they’ve already called the police and have been searching for hours. Jazz is rarely wrong, though, and Danny doesn’t find it hard to believe that Maddie holds her reputation over the safety of her children.
“What happened last night?” Lancer says.
Jazz stares down at her bandaged hands, and Danny sets his sandwich on the table.
“Our parents have been working on something new for a while,” Jazz says. “A weapon meant to paralyze a ghost, make it easier to capture and transport.”
Danny folds his arms in his lap and takes deep breaths. Jazz’s voice is flat, like she’s reading off a report for school she’s in the middle of editing.
“What makes it different from their other weapons?” Lancer says.
“I’m not sure, but it is different. It’s…worse, somehow. Even the ghost portal is scared of it. It turns a ghost’s own energy against them by taking advantage of their regeneration abilities and their loose molecular structure.”
Lancer tilts his head in question. Danny is quiet, this information as new to him as it is to Lancer.
“Ghosts can’t be brought back. They can inhabit this plane, but it’s something half-way. They can’t be alive again, not really. Maddie has tried.”
Jazz glances to Danny, then back to her hands.
“It didn’t work.”
She releases a long breath. “Essentially, the weapon is doing something impossible on purpose. Trying to resurrect them, knowing that it won’t work, so the ghosts are imprisoned as their own bodies fight between two states of being.”
“Alive and dead,” Danny murmurs. “But I’m alive and dead, aren’t I? I don’t get it.”
Jazz shrugs a shoulder. “I don’t either. I have some theories, and I’m sure Maddie could figure it out if she knew.”
“I don’t understand what this weapon has to do with you coming here. Did she try to hurt Danny with it?” Lancer says.
“She tried to, but Jazz got in the way,” Danny says.
Lancer’s eyes round. “So it hit Jasmine?”
Jazz nods, pressing the thumb of her good hand to her bandaged palm.
“What kind of effect would that have on someone already alive? Someone alive can’t be resurrected,” Lancer says carefully.
“As far as we know,” Jazz says. “It definitely did something to me. I’m just not sure what.”
The room falls quiet. Lancer’s eyes dart across the coffee table, like he can find the answer in the swirls of wood and sandwich crumbs.
“How do you know it did something to you?” he finally asks.
Jazz and Danny exchange looks.
“Her heart isn’t beating anymore,” Danny announces.
Lancer stiffens, and Jazz frowns.
“Wait, what? That can’t be right,” he says.
“I promise it isn’t. Unless it’s started up again?” Danny says.
Jazz is quiet for a moment before shaking her head. “No. Still not beating.”
Lancer pales several shades. “Oh, God. Really? Oh, my God.”
“I mean, she’s still walking and talking, so…” Danny tries.
Lancer rubs a hand over his face. Danny hunches his shoulders, suddenly feeling like he’s in trouble for cheating on a test, which is ridiculous. If anything, Jazz cheated death, and he feels like Lancer should be more happy than worried about that.
“Okay. Okay,” Lancer mutters. “Alright. Anything else? Do you still need to breathe?”
Surprise flickers across Jazz’s face. “I mean, I think so.”
She closes her mouth and stills for a few seconds. Then a few more seconds. She begins to look slightly panicked.
“Oh,” she says, faintly.
“So you don’t need to breathe?” Danny says, feeling a little panicked himself now.
“I guess not,” she says.
Danny isn’t sure why this feels more startling than the lack of a pulse, but Jazz also seems more disturbed than before. Maybe the shock is just finally wearing off.
“Well, I’m still going to breathe. Just in case,” she says.
Lancer shakes his head. “Oh, my God. This is insane.”
“You try being the zombie,” Jazz mutters.
“Sorry,” Lancer says.
“Okay. Let’s--let’s think about this. You’ve been…” Danny doesn’t want to say dead, because she’s not dead-- “different for, what, over twelve hours by now? If you were a zombie your skin would’ve started falling off by now or something.”
Lancer looks a little queasy. Jazz shakes her head. “We have no idea what this is, Danny. We don’t know the rules. What if decomp is just a lot slower?”
“What if it’s just not happening at all?” he fires back.
Jazz’s mouth twitches up. “That would be optimal, yeah.”
“Would it help if we could get into the lab? Or a hospital, or something?”
“Maybe. I’ve got the blueprints to the gun in my room. Maybe with that and some readings on my energy outputs we could figure something out.”
“So you’re just going home?” Lancer cuts in.
“No way. We can sneak in and out, easy,” Danny says.
Jazz raises her eyebrows doubtfully. “‘Easy’? I don’t think so, Danny. They’ve been increasing security down there lately, against both humans and ghosts. I’m not sure you’d be able to sneak in and out like you usually do.”
“Okay. Maybe we could get them away from the house, then? Tucker could help us bypass the security protocols or whatever if I can’t slip through the walls.”
“Get them away from the house how?” Jazz says.
“I mean, I’m kind of their favorite target. I’ll just go make some noise on the other side of town and let them chase me around for a while so you guys can get in the lab.”
Jazz frowns. “I don’t like that plan, Danny.”
“Why not? They’ve been chasing me for forever now, and their stupid weapon exploded. I can handle them.”
“They think I’m in cahoots with you. Or, Phantom-you. I’m guessing that’ll make you an even bigger target.”
“Why don’t I call them both in for a parent-teacher conference?” Lancer says.
They both turn to him.
“Would that work?” Danny asks Jazz.
“Maybe. They might worry that he’s getting suspicious and go to make sure nobody is onto them, at least.”
“But didn’t we just have parent-teacher conferences a little while ago?” Danny says.
“Your parents missed theirs.”
“Oh,” Danny says. “That sounds about right.”
“You would do that?” Jazz says.
“Of course. Compared to breaking into a high-security lab, I think I can handle talking to your parents for half an hour.”
“You’d be surprised,” Danny mutters.
“I’ll call them Monday, then. You two should use the weekend to get some rest.”
“You should probably get some rest too. You look more like a zombie than Jazz does, and her heart isn’t even beating,” Danny says.
Jazz whacks his shoulder, and Lancer looks like he might pass out.
“Yes. Okay. That sounds good,” he says, dazed.
Lancer wanders off into the house. They hear his bedroom door shut, then several Oh my God’s before the house falls quiet again.
“Your heart isn’t even beating,” Danny repeats.
Jazz hums in agreement. “Yeah. Being undead must be a family trait, huh?”
Danny’s lips quirk up. “I mean, so far it’s just you and me. I feel like we’re outliers.”
Jazz’s face falls, and she goes quiet for a second. Danny hesitates.
“Are we…not? Outliers, I mean?”
Jazz runs her fingers along her bandaging. “Do you remember when you were little, and our parents took us into the forest? The one where Grandma used to live.”
Danny picks through the few blurred memories from his childhood, recognition flashing at the image of tall, looming trees beneath a starry sky.
“I think so. It was late at night, right?”
“What else do you remember?”
“Not much. Just the car and the trees.”
“You were asleep for most of it,” Jazz says.
“Why? What happened?”
Her eyes go distant and glazed, like she’s remembering the dark trees and the stuffy car.
“Mom tried to bring Grandma back.”
Danny takes in a sharp breath. He pushes the image away of a younger Jazz crouched over a grave, Maddie coaxing the spirit out of the ground and up to face her daughter.
“Why?” he whispers.
Jazz shrugs, her gaze still far away. “To prove that she could? To prove that parenthood and a career spent digging up bodies could mesh? I don’t know.”
“It didn’t work,” Danny says.
“No. It didn’t,” Jazz says softly.
“Did they use the same thing they shot at us?” Danny says.
“Not exactly, but I think they used the same science.”
Danny leans back against the couch, sliding down into the cushions. Sunlight slides lazily over the coffee table, brightening the brown wood golden. He closes his hand around the material of his shirt, and belatedly realizes they don’t have any clothes here.
His chin trembles.
“Jazz?” he says.
She hums in response.
“This kind of sucks,” he says. He’s trying for a laugh, but the sound is a little too watery.
Jazz is still leaning forward, but he can see the wry curve to her mouth when she smiles.
“I know. But, hey, this kind of thing runs in our blood, huh?”
She turns her head to meet his eyes. Danny laughs, again, more genuine but just as tearful. He scrubs his eye with his fist.
“Yeah. At least we can be undead together. It was getting kind of lonely,” he says.
Jazz’s expression softens. “I can imagine.”
She leans back into the cushions, too, and Danny moves to lean his head on her shoulder.
“We’re going to figure this out, right?” he whispers.
“Yeah. Together. I promise.”
Danny sighs, quieting for the sound of her heart beat before he remembers it isn’t there anymore.